Many companies are pro-active in building better websites and ensuring they meet various requirements set by Google to rank highly.
However, sometimes you find that no matter what you do you can’t improve what you have and so you need to find someone who can help.
Our client got in touch with us with the specific task of improving Google Pagespeed.
They had a decently sized website (more than 30 pages) and they were already ranking quite well in Google, but they wanted to build on this and ensure they had a good foundation for future work on their site.
Finding out what’s wrong with your website speed
There are many tools these days which will scan your website and give you a speed score – such as GTMetrix, Pingdom and Google Pagespeed.
These sites scan your website pages and score them for different criteria in order to build up a better idea of how well optimised it is.
Remember, that these sites only give general guidelines and don’t necessarily tell you how to fix problems.
They merely point at areas of the website which can be improved or are not as good as other sites which have been scanned.
Once you’ve got a good idea of where your site is lacking then you can start looking at your website code and updating it accordingly.
Things you can do to improve your website speed
- Compress your pictures
- Minify and combine code such as CSS and JS
- Use a CDN
- Choose a better web server
- Use caching plugins
Why website speed isn’t the only thing you should care about
Although it’s important to have a fast loading website you should remember that the guidelines offered on GTMetrix and Pagespeed are not always relevant to your site.
If your site needs third party scripts to work or uses APIs etc then it may not be possible to reduce the number of calls to the sever and so on.
If you are happy with the website loading then it may be worth considering if you really need to spend time and money on further optimising it for minimal speed gains.
Why you should care about website speed
As more customers view websites on their mobile devices it is important they are served quickly.
Website speed is important because faster loading sites have more chance of being viewed, whereas slow loading websites will be passed before they fully load.
It’s the same as answering the phone on time or waiting for 7 seconds before you pick up – you will lose some customers if you take too long unfortunately.
Once customers are on your site then good website speed also offers them a better user experience.
Customers who have a better experience using your website are more likely to use it again, and more likely to recommend it to others.
How we got a perfect score in Google Pagespeed
When we viewed our clients website we found that although images were properly optimised and caching was being used it was infact the WordPress theme they were using which was causing unnecessary scripts to load.
We were able to load a faster loading theme, reduce the number of scripts loaded in the background and replaced many plugins with native theme features.
Combined with improved caching and optimisation of the code meant we ended up with a very satisfied client.